Apple’s claim that it protects user data from the authorities appears to be somewhat selective.

If you gun down children at a day care centre and fire at police, then Apple will protect your phone after your death. But if you dare to run a torrent site which the movie and music studios don’t like then Apple will pass your iTunes shopping list to Homeland Security.

This week the coppers arrested alleged Kickass Torrents (KAT) boss Artem Vaulin. But the entire case is based on data obtained from Apple, Facebook and Coinbase.

According to the criminal complaint against Vaulin, the US Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement took time from their busy schedule of protecting democracy against terrorists to conduct an online probe into the alleged pirate king's activities

It said that investigators were able to use “Records provided by Apple” to access an email account, tirm [AT] me [DOT] com, used by Vaulin.

Since Me.com email addresses are part of Apple’s s MobileMe platform it is fair to say it turned over the lot. Apparently there were 31 emails stored in the account which showed Vaulin and other Kickass team members discussing bugs on the site and progress towards fixing them.

Not content with that Jobs’ Mob also provided IP addresses, which showed that tirm [AT] me [DOT] com conducted an iTunes transaction using IP Address 109.86.226.203 on or about July 31, 2015. The same IP Address was used on the same day to login into the KAT Facebook Account. Then, on or about December 9, 2015, tirm [AT] me [DOT] com used IP Address 78.108.181.81 to conduct another iTunes transaction. The same IP Address was logged as accessing the KAT Facebook Account on or about December 4, 2015.”

Ironically he was stupid enough to buy something legally online from iTunes rather than pirate it. However he might have assumed that since Jobs’ Mob was prepared to go to the highest court in the land rather than turn over the account details of mass murdering terrorist, it might have done a bit more to protect his personal privacy.

Er no. Investigators were also allowed to search Vaulin’s Apple iCloud account, and in it claim they “discovered that Vaulin has an instant message account he uses with the username 'nike." Looks like the Goddess of Victory was not impressed.

The Web pages of the New South Wales State Emergency Service were bought to their knees by a hacker who felt that was what his religion would have wanted. According to the Sydney Morning Herald the hacker seemed to think that the Prophet Muhammad would have approved of the fact that Australians, including fellow Muslims, would not have been able to get information on their emergency services.

In fact that hacker was certain that instead of getting much needed information, they would rather read the hacker's rants about the US, France, and Israel. “How can you even think talking about our Prophet Muhammad?? ... We will never let you humiliate and tease the Muslims,” the defaced site read.

Of course there were some limits to the hackers crusade. The web pages targeted were sub-pages for regions including Wollongong, Sydney Southern, Gosford, Hurstville, Guyra, Corindi, Armidale, Ryde, Randwick, Lismore, Tamworth, Kogarah, Manly, Orange, Shoalhaven and Inverell. If you have not heard of any of these places, it is not surprising. It is unlikely that the population of these areas would care a dingo's kidneys what was going on in the other side of the world. Insulting someone else's prophet is not really one of the list of crimes would be well below other more important things like avoiding sitting on those red backed spiders in the dunny.

However that did not stop “Turk Muslim Hacker” thinking that they would be the ideal place to have a crusade. If anything they would not have seen it coming. All of the targeted web pages were defaced with the same message and while they have been pulled offline.

It appears that the emergency services were not under threat. The websites were hosted on a different server to the one that hosts the main SES site.

The government is currently moving its SES units across to the state-wide server, which is more secure. Meanwhile the creator of the YouTube video, alternately titled “Innocence of Muslims” or “The Real Life of Muhammad”, was arrested last week for violating terms of his probation.

The IT Crowd working for the Australian government is in a bit of hot water after the website, aph.gov.au, has been down for a couple of days after a botched maintenance upgrade.

When the site went down everyone expected that it was hackers or someone protesting about something, but Alan Thompson, secretary of the Department of Parliamentary Services, said the specific cause of the failure was still a mystery but there was no external attack on the aph.gov.au site.

What it seems is that the Government's IT department decided to do major maintenance upgrade of our whole IT system including security patches. One of the upgrades was a security upgrade of the website to help repel attacks and hacking attacks. It all worked well for internal users but for some reason it saw the rest of the world as a dangerous place and would not let it in.

Apparently it took an elaborate rebooting process to actually fully reconnect it to the external world.

The Federal Court of Australia has ordered a central coast blogger to shut down a number of salacious and pornographic websites because they featured Speedo swimming costumes. According to the Sydney Morning Herald the swimwear giant took Dave Evans to court, claiming that his websites amounted to trademark infringement.

Seeing Speedo swim suits being used for porn would lower the outfits reputation. Some of the sites featured images of men wearing Speedo briefs, as well as pornographic images, which Speedo claimed were offensive.

Evans, known online as the "Bisexual Blogger" and "aussiespeedoguy", went further and registered domain names containing the word "Speedo". He didn't show up at court abd Federal Court Justice Geoffrey Flick ordered that Mr Evans shut down the offending websites and transfer the domain names to Speedo.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced plans to launch a porn website to promote animal rights and vegan diets.

PETA spokesperson Lindsay Rajt said on Tuesday that PETA has applied with ICM Registry to launch peta.xxx. Apparently, the site will feature “tantalizing” videos and photos, that will lead users into animal rights messages.

The site is said to allow PETA to reach a broader audience, which makes additional publicity important. She said:"I think the bottom line is we live a in a 24-hour news cycle where over the years we've found our racier actions are kind of a fast track way to get people to stand up and pay attention about the plight of animals". Of course, helping hunger stricken countries and dying humans is not something PETA will make a porn site over.

Critics claim that PETA’s move is a wrong one, as it may ultimately estrange other devoted fans of the group. General counsel of Morality in Media anti-porn group Robert Peters said:”Metaphorically speaking, they're getting in bed with hard core pornographers to prevent cruelty to animals. That borders on insanity.”

To be fair, there are few better ways to promote something than chucking it onto a porn page. Some would even go as far as saying that we wouldn’t even need all this bandwidth if there wasn’t for porn, but I'm sure they'll be happy to help the animals. Or whatever. (Kinky Kelly and the sexy stud anyone? sub.ed.)

A porn site, which has been sending out take-down notices against companies which display its content, is issuing take down notices against those which display them.

Perfect 10 has been suing Google since 2005. In 2007, a federal appeals court rendered a far-reaching decision, saying search engines like Google were not infringing copyrights by displaying thumbnails and hyperlinking to Perfect 10’s perfect babes.

However part of the case, originally filed in 2005, is back before the San Francisco-based appeals court. Now Perfect 10 claims that Google’s forwarding of Perfect 10’s takedown notices to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse website constitutes copyright infringement.

Chilling Effects collects takedown notices and has published thousands of them for scholarly research. Perfect 10 claims Google’s actions amount to copyright infringement because Perfect 10’s takedown notices include the nude pics.

We wonder if the take down of the take down notice will also be subject to a take down notice.

The FaceMash.com web address that landed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in trouble as a Harvard University student has been flogged for more than $30,000.

Zuckerberg was a Harvard student in 2003 when he made a FaceMash.com website at which people could compare pictures of coeds at the college and rate which was "hotter". The site was shut down by Harvard administrators unhappy with the stunt. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard and started Facebook the next year.

FaceMash was the inspiration for Facebook social notworking site and was memorialised in "The Social Network" film about the birth of Facebook.The buyer of web address remained secret, but Flippa went on record saying that it wasn't anyone from Facebook or Sony Pictures, which made "The Social Network" flick.

Microsoft is deploying a big overhaul to the Xbox.com website today. The update will add a variety of new features, the biggest of which is the new website-based online avatar editing, which is sure to be a big hit.

Beyond the avatar editing the new version of the site will feature a major update to the message center and friend request center. The wraps will be taken off the new parental management system, which will allow those with the new Xbox Live Family pack accounts to manage their account settings as well as to better monitor what the kids are doing on Xbox Live.

The site will feature some look and feel improvements, as well, which have been needed for some time. The updates are deploying ahead of the upcoming Fall Dashboard Update which is necessary for Kinect. The Fall Dashboard Update is likely to arrive starting sometime next week.

As we told you previously, the majority of the update is some cosmetic changes combined with support for Kinect. The biggest of the non-Kinect improvements is the lifting of the friends’ cap, which will finally break the 100 friend barrier.

Tongue of rock Gene Simmons' is probably regretting going on the attack against hackers.The former aging rocker sat on a panel recently and offered somewhat draconian views about file sharers.

He called on companies to make sure their brand was protected. “Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don't let anybody cross that line."

But what got some hacker's goat was the comment that the music industry “was asleep at the wheel and didn't have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we're left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There's no industry."

A group of hackers called Anonymous was sure that he was referring to them and declared war. Two of his sites, GeneSimmons.com and SimmonsRecords.com were placed into intensive care. At the time of writing, they still seem entirely disabled.

It is possible that Anonymous might not have done anything more about Simmons and his expressiveness until he decided to make matters worse. Simmons offered on his Web site: "Some of you may have heard our sites are being threatened by hackers. Our legal team and the FBI have been on the case and we have found a few, shall we say 'adventurous' young people, who feel they are above the law. And, as stated in my MIPCOM speech, we will sue their pants off. First, they will be punished. Second, they might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who's been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend. We will soon be printing their names and pictures. We will find you. You cannot hide. Stay tuned."

Now we are not sure what technology Simmons has invented to find out who carried out the DDOS attack but comments like that are just daft. So it appears that certain members of Anonymous have decided to make Simmons their own personal target. We expect to hear little of Simmons on the web for some time.

An attack on the hosting provider Reality Check Network took down several major BitTorrent sites. According to Torrent Freak it was the biggest attack on torrent sites yet.

Although BitTorrent sites go down all the time for various reasons, the massive blackout is unusual. The list of names is impressive. Torrents.net, Vertor.com, Yourbittorrent.com, Torrentfunk.com, Torrenthound.com, Torrentreactor.net, Torrentzap.com, Torrentmatrix.com and Fulldls.com were taken out.

According to Reality Check Network the attack took place early Saturday morning. An intruder managed to corrupt the Master Boot Records of several servers. Backups are in place and are expected to be installed soon.

According to Reality Check Network the attack is being blamed on a disgruntled ex-employee who was with the company for three years as a result he had intimate knowledge of its systems. So not an RIAA plot after all.